Do you think robots will be able to beat humans at soccer by 2050?

To close this year's soccer season after Spain's victory in the EUROCUP we went to the robotic kingdom to see who was driving the game. With Prof. Manuela Veloso from Carnegie Mellon University and President-Elect of the International RoboCup Federation, we'll be looking behind the scene of the best known competition in robot soccer. Finally, we'll be discussing the future with a poll on the future of artificial dribblers and their odds against the human 2050 world champions.

Manuela Veloso

Manuela Veloso is Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania, President-Elect of the International RoboCup Federation and leader of the Coral Research Group (Cooperate, Observe, Reason, Act, and Learn). Since the first official Robocup soccer games in 1997, she's been active in presenting teams to the Sony AIBO 4-legged league, the smallsize league, simulation league and Segway league with a great success at adding stars to the shirts of her robotics players with numerous first places in world and US championships.

In this episode we'll be focusing on the CMDragon's team cookie-box wheeled robots of the small size league and their offboard perception.

We'll also be looking at how the CMDash team has tamed the AIBO robot dogs to perceive their world and cooperate in a decentralized manner, with an emphasize on the challenges related to competing against different opponents and need for the teams to adapt during the games.

Since the AIBOs are no longer produced, the RoboCup org is now making way for the Nao humanoid as the next challenging platform in robot soccer along with other research driving leagues such as the Nano-gram league previously features in Talking Robots (see Brad Nelson's interview).

lancelot wrote:Robots will NEVER beat humans!! -Just because humans have virtuosity robots shall never have... sorry

hmm, I wouldn't subscribe to that... I agree that Bruninho&Co. will win for some years to come, but at some point there is no doubt the robots will win. Apart from the physical weakness of humans (strength, endurance, precision etc.), imagine the advantages of almost unlimited strategic memory, blind understanding etc.

lancelot wrote:Robots will NEVER beat humans!! -Just because humans have virtuosity robots shall never have... sorry

hmm, I wouldn't subscribe to that... I agree that Bruninho&Co. will win for some years to come, but at some point there is no doubt the robots will win. Apart from the physical weakness of humans (strength, endurance, precision etc.), imagine the advantages of almost unlimited strategic memory, blind understanding etc.

Bender

The devil is in the details I think. I would argue that even with today's technology we could build a humanoid who can beat all top human goalkeepers in penalty kicks by simply kicking the the ball very very very hard. Ball velocities would be positively dangerous, so would such a robot be allowed to play?

And if that sort of robot can be built today, why not build a robot that can do the same form the 16m line. Or the mid line. Or have to goalkeeper score directly.

For me the vision of a team of humanoid robots working in unison and artistically juggling the ball like current world class human players at their best is very inspiring. And I think this vision is great, I think it is a fantastic motivation and I hope it will inspire many people in the future.

However, I think it is important to keep in mind that the final outcome - the robots we will have in 2050 - might be very different from what we imagine today. Just like the final outcome of the "mechanical horse" dreamt up long ago as a modern way of locomotion turned out to be very different.

There are at least 2 robots' capabilities to weight up: mecanic and AI.In my opinion, we will achieve in 40 years the technology to build mecanicalbodies similar to ours. With the same number of ddl or more.

After that and regarding to the IA area, I hope that we will be able to developby 2050 an IA enough powerful to use fully the capabilities of the mecanicalbodies. For that, we have to work hard during the next 40 years. ^^